Don’t be a victim of blackmail

We deliver a lot of websites for a wide variety of clients ranging from Olympic athletes to high profile business people, and everywhere in between.

There has been a disturbing trend of groups/people buying the domain name of an individual or group and then linking it off to, well lets just say, sites that are not exactly PG-13. In some cases, entire websites have been built to slander a particular person or group. Imagine the damage that could occur if someone bought www.andrewthiel.com and then linked it to a site that was promoting pornography, racism, or a radical organization that I would never support.

In many cases an email is sent to the person or group that is the target of such an attack (usually the persons name .com) asking for money to sell the domain back to them. Many people will look into how to take a link like this down and even call police, only to find out that it is an almost impossible endeavour, many of them pay the “ransom” just not to have the negative publicity.

Be sure to register at least your own name in the .com and .ca and if you are a business that does not have a website yet for various reasons, buy the domain and sit on it. Depending on your financial resources, buy the domains associated with your children as well, don’t leave yourself open to blackmail attempts.

As the general public (and criminals) get more tech savvy I suspect we will see more situations like this, avoid a bad situation that could not just cost you time and money to address, but that could compromise your on-line reputation.